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Comment by pocoloco | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that if I try to retort to each point we may end up talking past each other.

But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation.

Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO.

How Inflation Is Stealing Your Wealth | Jeff Booth | Pomp Podcast #572 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCqFjU9Wi4

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There are over 150 nations, most of them tiny that have a currencies, it's not rocket science.

A nations currency will have the integrity and competency of the governing class, so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt.

Frankly, this whole thing stinks of corruption, my bet is that the leadership are already speculating on BTC and are making big statements like Musk to drive it up, and that their fingers will be in the pot of the BTC volcanic mining.

But it may be moot: you can't force people to use BTC and businesses, esp. those that import will balk at it, and citizens likely won't adopt it.

Ask a US, Canadian, UK, Brazilian bank to provide basic financial services for citizens and they'd do it in a heartbreat.

The 'currency problem' in El Salvador is just a symptom of underlying problems.

How stable are those national currencies to inflation over time though?

Notably, the British Pound Sterling is named such because 1 British pound originally represented a pound of Sterling Silver. Today it takes over 400 British pounds to buy 1 pound of sterling silver.

Twenty US Dollars were worth 1 oz of gold until 1933. Today it is nearly 2000 USD per oz.

I challenge your statement that it is easy for a government to manage a currency over the long term. In fact it seems impossible for politicians and central bankers to resist the temptation to inflate their currencies to infinity.

Why haven’t the US, Canadian, UK or Brazilian banks provided services to the 70% of El Salvadorans today? What are were they waiting for all this time? I believe it simply wasn’t profitable enough for them.

> so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt.

Ok, so I’m going to straight-up ask you to either retract this racist statement or justify your position with evidence.

I want to see your proof that the government of El Salvador is corrupt. This link seems to indicate the opposite [1].

To help you see the light, let me highlight the fact that El Salvador lost their own currency after a bloody 12 year long civil war that was funded by an interventionist US government that raised an army of child soldiers in the 1980s.

Per Wikipedia [2], the Carter and Reagan administrations spent $1-2 million per day in 1980 dollars to raise and train this army of child soldiers.

Tell me again why El Salvador is corrupt and that is why they lost their currency?

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/slv

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

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